Advances in microprocessor, networking and related technologies have led to wide spread deployment and adoption of server-client based applications. In particular, with the advance of high speed public networks, such as the Internet, increasing amounts of rich content, such as video, are being served and available for consumption by networked clients.
For a variety of reasons, most client devices are equipped with progressive scan monitors. Resultantly, video contents are typically encoded and streamed to client devices for consumption in a progressive format. While a substantial volume of video content is available in the progressive format, there exist also large volumes of video contents in other formats, such as the interlaced format or the telecine format (which may be progressive or interlaced).
Interlaced format video typically consists of fields and frames. See FIG. 6a. A field is a set of either the even scan lines or odd scan lines at a particular instant in time. A frame is a set of one even field interleaved (i.e. interlaced) with one temporally neighboring odd field. The even and odd fields typically do not represent the video at the same time, but are instead separated by some small amount of time, e.g. 1/60 or 1/50 of a second As a result, viewing of a single frame of interlaced video, especially when motion is present, can be rather unnatural, due to the motion interlaced artifacts caused by the time difference between the fields. These artifacts are often referred to or known as “interlace lines” or “interlaced fingers”.
Telecine generally refers to the process of converting 24 frame-per second (fps) progressive format (e.g. from film) to 30 fps interlaced (e.g. NTSC, National Television Standard Committee). The process typically involves repeating certain fields of the video, in e.g. a 3:2 pattern. See FIG. 6b. 
A number of deinterlacers and telecine inverters to deinterlace interlaced or invert telecine formatted videos to a progressive format are known in the art, and available for use by video providers to accomplish the conversion. However, under the prior art, the responsibility of selecting and invoking the appropriate reformatter, i.e. a deinterlacer or a telecine inverter, rests on the user operators of a video provider.
Unfortunately, user operators of video providers often do not know the content format well enough to invoke the appropriate “reformatter”. The task is further complicated by the fact that many videos are mixed formats, e.g. a telecine formatted video may contain one or more portions of interlaced video.
Thus, availability of methods and/or apparatuses to automatically detect and reformat video from one of a number of formats to a format of choice is desired.